Commentaries on museum studies; culture and cultural forms; interdisciplinary scholarship and cultural studies; the political dimensions of signification; art and aesthetics in comparative perspectives; Memory work in Africa and the African Diaspora; slavery, race and representation; anthropological inquiry. Often concerned with the Museum of Culture and Environment at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, WA, and (as of July 2017) with the MSU Museum at Michigan State University.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Yesterday, our colleagues Cynthia Mitchell (Journalism) and Jay Ball (Theater) organized an event around a reading of selections from the play, "My Name is Rachel Corrie," to kick off our campus celebrations of First Amendment week. Rachel's parents, Craig and Cindy Corrie, spoke eloquently about their daughter's life and the work of the Foundation they have established in her memory. Three skilled students in our Theater BFA program, directed by Jay, performed scenes from the work. The play, in Rachel's own words, is usually performed as a one woman show, but in this instance Jay had the lines move fluidly between the three young women performers At one point, two of the actresses accidentally spoke over one another, which struck me as quite as quite appropriate, given the play's evocation of Rachel's own overlapping, at times messy, internal dialogue. As in the past, I was particularly struck by the line in which the young Rachel ponders her own frequent shifts in point of view, and wonders if that is what life is--"a new draft for every day"?

Cindy spoke of the famous incident, a month before her daughter's death, in which Rachel was photographed burning a child's drawing of the American flag. As Cindy noted, it is important to understand the context of this event. This was on the day of the international mass protests against the US invasion of Iraq, at time when it was vital that members of the International Solidarity Movement build a degree of trust with the local Palestinian community; Rachel had refused the initial request to burn an image of the Israeli flag on the grounds she would never desecrate a Star of David; and she had penciled in the strips of the "flag' the names of the US military-industrial corporations most likely to benefit from the coming war, precisely to demonstrate that not all of America was equally complicit in the coming war. (As my colleague Geraldine O'Mahoney noted, these nuances were often reported in European coverage of the incident, but were often left out in US coverage.) At the time, some US rightwing commentators asserted that having committed this flag-burning act of treason Rachel "deserved" her death at hands of an IDF bulldozer driver. As Anne Cubilie and Craig Corrie remarked, such representations entirely effaced the enormous courage required to engage in sustained non-violent protest and international solidarity in human rights struggles.

In my remarks on the panel, I riffed a bit on the point, made repeatedly by Noam Chomsky, that freedom of expression is repressed in the US not primarily through governmental action, but through more subtle mechanism of market-oriented mass media conglomerates, and the even more subtly through the organization of seeming “common sense” in modern American culture. The Amnesty International report on human rights atrocities during the recent IDF operations in Gaza, for example, is freely available to all on line, but was hardly reported in mainstream US coverage.

As a case of point of the ideological operations of cultural-mediated repression, I returned to the flag burning incident and its circulation in the US mediascape. The incident, it occurred to me, stands in striking contrast to the performance we had just seen. At stake in these two moments are two very different modes of envisioning relations between the Living and the Dead; they exemplify what we might call the Nationalist and Humanistic visions of memorialization, two alternate modes of imagining symbolic exchange between the Living and the Dead. The first tends to represses free expression, while the second is potentially liberatory.

In their book, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag, Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle argue that in modern American civil religion, the Stars and Stripes has been sacralized as the reborn soul of the martyred soldier who has fallen in battle, through whose blood sacrifice in war the entire nation is regenerated. This has the unfortunate effect of homogenizing the dead, rendering them all identical in a generic fashion, erasing all traces of their complexity and individuality. We saw this process at play in the weeks after 9-11 in lower Manhattan, as the haunting mini-memorials to the lost, in the form of photocopied photographs of missing loved ones, were gradually replaced with American flags, a process that marked the nationalization of the Dead, turning them into a nationalist pantheon of martyrs. This ritual process of "recruiting" the homogenized Dead was critical in the ideological run up to the Iraq war. It was also consistent with the public demonization by the Right of Rache, as if, in burning the child's drawing of the flag, she had desecrated the memory of the 9-11 victims and American military servicemen.

How different from this rather cult-like mechanical ritualization of the generic Dead, is the play "My Name is Rachel Corrie", which enables a very different dynamic relationship to emerge between the Living and the Dead, between the living audience and the lost young woman whom we come to know. The play bravely complexifies a particular person, in all her contradictions, tensions, with multiple, experimental voices, sometimes even bursting out into song and dance. Hence, the brilliance of staging the play through three activists, allowing them even to talk over one another. The text edited by Alan Rickman in this respect is reminiscent of The Diary of Anne Frank, allowing us, in effect, to listen in on the process of interior psycho-social development. We hear a changing voice governed by a profound ethical sense, but protean, in process, in continuous revision. In Rachel’s own words, we hear life being lived as “a new draft for every day.”

And that at the end of the day is what we fight for each day in defending the First Amendment (both in its US constitutional form and as a yet-to-be-realized global ideal)-- the right not to be governed by a singular homogenous reductive vision of the Living or of the Dead. The right to exist in a state of contradiction and of experimentation, the right to listen, against all odds, for those small unacknowledged voices in productive tension with one another. The right, so beautifully demonstrated in the play, to acknowledge nightmares and humor in the same line, to profoundly disagree with others and even with oneself. For the right in Rachel’s words, to live life in a constant process of becoming. To live a “new draft for every day.”

I recently attended an opening of Kenyan artist Jim Chuchu at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Seattle, WA. Chuchu manages to traverse territories of experience that are simultaneously ancient and contemporary, rediscovering in the heart of cosmopolitan hipness startling dreamscapes that open up unexpected chasms, into spiritual zones half-forgotten or long eclipsed.

In the new video work, “To Catch a Dream,” by Chuchu and his NEST collective, a young woman (played by famed Kenyan supermodel Ajuma Nasenyana) is plagued each night by the dream of her dead lover, as she sleeps in her fashionable urbane home. Catching the dream in a bag she travels into the Land of Dreams to return the soul of the dead to a deity (another beautiful female figure, perhaps an alter ego of the dreamer) who claims the soul as her own. Her quest takes her across water and through canyons, into a distant African past that remains sharp and stylish. Caught between the lands of the living and of the dead, between waking and sleep, she makes a profound choice, embracing love and union with Mystery, leaving her metropolitan home quiet, still, and empty.

In “Pagans” (2014) and “Invocation,” (2015) Chuchu takes us on other profound and dizzying journeys of psycho-spiritual time travel, spanning distant African pasts and potential Afro-futures, In so doing he remixes the popular religious experience of spirit possession—the penetration of the human body, at times willful, at times unbidden, by the vast, invisible forces of the universe. In many communities in African and its Diaspora, spiritual presences are summoned into the body of the novice through dance, music, chanting, masking and other disciplines. The initial experience of possession, many devotees explain, is often terrifying, experienced as a kind of dreadful, incapacitating illness or sense of freefall. Seeking healing, the possessed often join secret societies or “cults of affliction” that promise them relief from the terrors of the possessing other. In striking contrast to many Christian and Muslim traditions, the goal of ceremonial action is not to exorcise or cast out the spirit out. Rather, the rites establish productive alliances between the living worshipper and the spirit, so that that the mysterious power becomes a source of life-enhancing strength, binding the once troubled soul into an empowered community of “wounded healers.”

In his Pagans series, Chuchu evokes and remixes these enigmatic moments of possession, of intimate, radical encounters with spiritual entities that are both terrifying and life-fulfilling. The possessing forces are glimpsed by the dancer in the form of lightning, wild animals, or the celestial energies of a nocturnal starscape, wrapping itself around and through the body of the worshiper. Starting in Images 7 and 8, the ancient spiritual novice blast off to become, in images 9 through 12 a far future “Afronaut” —flying through galaxies as yet uncharted, becoming, in the flash of a supernova, at one with the cosmos. In many African spiritual traditions, trees are understood as abodes of the ancestors and divinities, providing their human charges with medicines and spiritual tools (including wood for mask making) that connect the living to the invisible powers. Appropriately, in Pagans 8,10, and 12, the devotee seems to grow branches out of his eyes or arms, transforming his body into a kind of world tree—conducting the chaotic, creative energies of the universe between sky and earth in great arcs of light.

We witness a more intimate process of possession in images 13, 14, 15. In 13, three female adepts are bathed in the glow of a sphere, perhaps a distant planet, that seems to pulse with spiritual energy. In 14, the power of divinity selects out a singular worshiper, descending towards her with the lightness of a feather. Her eyes are now dramatically animated; she has become fully awakened. In 15, the electrical explosion of Spirit has merged with her being, the sphere now radiating out of her skull as the released currents leap skyward.

In image 16, I am guessing, we have reached a new level of consciousness. Perhaps, following their celestial odyssey the Afronauts have landed on a new world. Here, the worshippers-turned-deities are connected to the sky not through blinding lightning bolts but through thin, graceful lines of transmission. The floating feather is no longer a dangerous source of uncontrolled power but rather a gentle element of spiritual potency, to be played with in the breeze. Here, suspended somewhere between most ancient past and future farscape, the Afronauts have come home. Invocation. (Video installation, 2015)

Rites of possession in Africa have long been associated with alternate forms of personhood and connection. In many tradition-based communities, persons who feel oppressed within the lineage or clan into which they we were born may be born anew into the collectivity of the secret society, made up of those who have learned to live productively with their possessing spirit.

In “Invocation,” Chuchu remixes this ancient template to envision a much more radical separation. In part one/the severance of tie, a swirling young male body dances, to the movement and rhythms that in other times would be associated with spirit possession, with the summoning of an invisible presence into visible flesh. A disembodied male voice pronounces, to a beat that is simultaneously ancient and techno: I am not your son. I am not your blood. Letters and a pulsing curser flash across the screen, alluding to duty and love and evil, perhaps traces of an anguished, emailed correspondence between father and son.

Are we to infer that the young man has come out to his father, and that the father, in homophobic rage, has cast out his son? Now, in this novel, psychedelic rite of techno-possession, the young man pronounces his own separation from the bonds of biological lineage and compulsory heterosexuality.

As in ancient rites of possession in Africa, this act of invocation, while emerging out of pain and unexpected injury, is transformed into a purposeful occasion of strength and empowerment. The body, swirling like a Sufi devotee seeking oneness with the Godhead, pulses with growing energy, growing the multiple arms of a Hindu divinity, emerging out of a chrysalis towards some other form of being.

Although the young man has been rejected and cast out, he is not facing an entirely solitary future. He is guided after all by the clapping rhythms of a line of young men, who would seem to stand in solidarity with him. Like the ancient initiate, he loses one family only to gain another one. We share the hope that like the soaring Afronauts of the Pagans series he too will, in time, safely land on a new planet, a new home, a new Nest offering love and dignity and harmony.

In the video work's conclusion,Part two/Release,we are allowed a glimpse of this more optimistic future. Two male figures in silhouette move across the screen, rising and falling from our field vision; they hold their heads upwards, and from their mouths columns of smoke billow skywards. Presumably, they are expelling a lifetime of stigma and stifled longing, perhaps even self loathing and externalized oppression. One figure falls below the screen and a new one, evidently reborn in a fuller, more integrated form, appears to the left. He moves towards the second figure, and they momentarily embrace and intertwine. Rejected from one set of ties, the traveler, at long last, is coming home.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

On Tuesday evening, April 28 we held our academic panel on the “Comfort Women” issue (“Sexual Slavery in the Wartime Japanese Empire: The Historical Record and the Politics of Memory”) and associated activities. Since the two different groups were in such close proximity, we had been a little nervous about potential confrontations with the Comfort Women denier group, associated with the screening of the film “Scottsboro Girls,” but everything was peaceful and without overt confrontation. A group of students from China staged a dignified, silent vigil in front of the theater room in the Student Union, where the film was being screened, without any unpleasant incidents.

The Korean Association chartered a bus from Seattle, and we had many fascinating and moving conversations with community members as everyone milled around waiting for the events to start. Our History and Museum Studies students had worked closely with Bang-Soon and Chong Eun to create in the SURC pit a striking small exhibition about Comfort Women and their long-term Wednesday protests in Seoul.

I attended the first half hour of the revisionist session upstairs in the theater. Our colleague Mariko Okada-Collins (a Japanese language instructor in World Languages) initially spoke about how she come to invite the director, Junjiro Taniyama. I was struck that at one point she explained she was doing all of this in part to redeem and defend the memory of her grandfather who had died, perhaps of starvation, in combat operations in New Guinea during World War II. She held up his photograph as she spoke and noted that her family had never even gotten his bones; she feels called to defend him, in effect, from charges of rape—the implication that the Imperial Japanese military organized a wartime sexual slavery system. I was very moved and fascinated by this moment, and later reflected upon it in my remarks at the academic panel, summarized below.

I did get to hear some of Dr. Koichi Mera’s remarks; he’s particularly known for this role in the lawsuit seeking to block the Comfort Women statue in Glendale, CA. So far as I could tell, he followed the standard revisionist script, repeating the points that have been repeatedly rebutted in such sites as:

We then went downstairs for a screening of a film about the Comfort Women activists, “The Butterflies flying high with Hope,” in the SURC pit. I was gratified to see a substantial crowd, that swelled to about 140 for the readings of Comfort Women testimonies, organized by my colleague Jay Ball in Theater. Jay, in consultation with the rest of the organizing committee, was careful to incorporate testimonies by Korean, Chinese, Filippino and Chinese women; the team worked hard to complicate standard nationalist narratives by including different kinds of accounts from diverse sources. They also practiced in an aesthetic sense what Julian Bonder has termed an ‘ethics of deferral’; they strove to speak clearly and simply, not emoting or ‘acting’ out the testimonies but, as much as possible, serving only as channels for the testimonies themselves. (Inevitably, given the power of the material, some emotions did break through.) The readings were restrained and dignified, with haunting moments of silence along the way.

Brian Carroll of our History Department then read aloud the widely circulated letter by US historians of Japan, submitted to the AHA:

Brian noted that all members of the CWU History Department had added their names to the letter in solidarity.

We then moved upstairs to the ballroom for the academic panel. By our count, about 285 gathered in the room, and the great majority stayed for the whole two hour session. We’d agreed to keep ourselves to strict time limits, to allow for serious discussion with the audience, and we were grateful that Arts and Humanities Dean Stacey Robertson, our moderator, was able to keep us right on track, never easy with a group of scholars! We began with a keynote by political scientist Bang-Soon Yoon providing an overview of the state sponsored system of sexual slavery known euphemistically as the “Comfort Women” system, first developed by the Japanese Imperial Navy in Shanghai in 1932 and then adapted by the Imperial Army. She then reviewed some of the solidarity work done by the Comfort Women activists and their close allies. These groups have worked in support of victims of military rape in other contexts around the globe, from the Eastern Congo to (most recently) Vietnam. Later she was able to show us some of the paintings created by Comfort Women, in some cases in art therapy contexts; really fascinating images that call for close readings of the intertwined dynamics of violence and redemption.

Yukiko Shigeto of Whitman College took us in a quite different direction from the narrative historiography of the keynote, noting the challenges of any process of representing the pain of others, especially those, like the Comfort Women, whose voices have been so long effaced or erased. How do we begin to hear their voices, without, in performance or in written texts, unintentionally erasing them? She linked this challenge to the insidious dangers of the discourse of “multiple perspectives” within the normative American ideological framework of academic freedom and the the co equal marketplace of ideas. The revisionist film’s title, “Scottsboro Girls” implies that testimonies of the women are fabricated, inflicting in her view an epistemic violence that pushes their voices into oblivion. How, she asks, in the face of all of this do we learn to listen, “beyond our conventional hearing range”?

Justin Jesty (University of Washington) then took us through the twists and turns of public discourse in Japan and the wider region of the Comfort Women issue across seventy years, noting that while there’s nothing new in the historical record as such (no new documents or substantial novelties in witness testimonies), the political valorizations of the narratives have dramatically altered over time. He gave particular attention to developments following the 2012 election of Prime Minister Abe’s government, including the often signaled desire by the current Cabinet to revisit the Kono statement and the increasingly toxic pressure placed on Japan’s print and broadcast media.

Davinder Bhowmik, also at the University of Washington, considered the various nationalist re-metaphorizations of the Comfort Women issue; as in other post colonial contexts, the image of the violated women’s body becomes useful for patriarchal nationalists in remasculinizing the postcolonial state; picking up on Yukiko’s points, she noted that this often happens in such a way as to undo the integrity of women’s experiences of suffering and subvert potential transnational solidarities among women. Art and literature she emphasized, are vital media for recovering those voices and productive potentialities, in the face of cynical nationalist deployments of the CW issue, across the political and geographical spectrum. To illustrate the point she read a selection from an Okinawan short story she has translated (soon to be published), “The Tree of the Butterflies,” set during the tumultuous battle of Okinawa in spring 1945. A group of women seek refuge in a cave, a deeply resonant trope in postwar Okinawa literature, redolent with the imagery of the many civilians killed by Imperial Japanese and Allied forces during the battle. If I understood Davinder’s reading, the cave in the story is simultaneously figured as a kind tomb and womb, a site of nearly unbearable loss as well as potential coming to consciousness. An Okinawan woman is “comforted” (a term replete with irony in these contexts) by a Korean “Comfort Woman,” who caresses her wounded back as they cower in silence. Later the Okinawan woman realizes she never even thought to ask the Korean women her name. The challenge of that silence, of the un-namedness, haunts us still as we struggle to trace the all-too-tenuous lines of connectedness among women in the Asia Pacific region, so easily fractured by multiple nationalist projects.

Chong Eun Ahn (an historian at Central) in turn picked up on themes in Davinder and Yukiko’s comments; she spoke to the complexities of colonial subjectivity, in occupied Korea and elsewhere. For all the simplistic efforts to reduce the Comfort Women histories to simplistic binaries (Korea vs. Japan, Conqueror vs Conquered, etc. the experience of colonial women in the system can’t be reduced to resistance or complicity; there is a complex intermediate space inhabited by colonial subjects, and most complexly by women coerced into sexual subjugations in wartime. Similarly, the categories of race and ethnicity in the discourse of the rightist revisionists, and of nationalists elsewhere in the region, need to be critiqued and rethought. How do we acknowledge the vast weight and numbing terror of oppressive systems of structural violence, while also recognizing subaltern agency and dignity, amidst all that which seeks to strip them of dignity? To do this she turns to DeCerteau’s distinction between strategies (generally available to the dominant) and tactics (generally available to the subaltern), Our challenge in alliance with the oppressed, past and present, might be conceived of as transforming tactics (of everyday survival and resistance) into strategies (of long term empowerment, dignity, solidarity,and nurturance) that cut across putative nationalist distinctions.

Anne Cubilié, another colleague at Central, who has written extensively on women’s wartime narratives of human rights atrocities in wartime, spoke to profound value of women’s first hand testimonies. Like others, she noted that for all the minor variations, there is a profound consistency to the deep patterns of the events described, a consistency that speaks to their great evidentiary value, which had been dismissed at the well known early post war tribunals. She emphasized the enormous courage it takes for women to tell of sexual violence and rape, of the need to respect meaningful silences, and of the necessity of art, fiction, poetry and other media that transcend conventional language to evoke, explore and redress the fundamental assaults on language, meaning and bodily integrity associated with rape in wartime.

I closed with some reflections on how the problem of the un-mourned Dead is interpolated into these crises of historical interpretation. I had been so struck at the revisionist event, that Ms. Okada Collins began her remarks by holding the photograph of her dead grandfather, killed in war in an unknown place, his remains denied to his loved ones. I found myself think of Roland Barthes’ famous observation that in the era of photography, we all die two deaths; a physical death and the second death when our face in the photograph is no longer recognized. Photographs of the under-recognized dead are also held in Seoul in the weekly "Comfort Women" Wednesday protests by survivors and their allies. For all the bitter arguments that divide us, how striking that all turn to these familiar everyday icon of modernity, the family photograph, to express the un-expressable pain of loss. How do we make sense of the ways in which the unsettled Dead weigh upon the minds and hearts of so many in the wider Asia Pacific region? (John Dower, in Embracing Defeat encapsulates a fundamental cultural challenge of the Occupation era to Japanese psyches in his pithy phrase: what do you tell the Dean when you lose? There are a multitude of other voices of the unrecognized dead in the devastated lands of the war’s ostensible victors.) How do these un-mourned souls enter into our undertakings at this moment, in the adjacent room of the revisionists and among us pondering this scholarly panel tonight?

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry notes that a primary function of torture is to erase the voice of the tortured. This is true from Treblinka to Guantanamo, and surely there was an aspect to that dynamic in the “Comfort Women” brothels and encampments, a silencing, erasure and shattering of language intertwined with the most intimate forms of violence against bodily integrity. Against that history, cruelly echoed by postwar structures of shame and overt repression, how do we heed Yukiko’s call for learning to listen beyond our own hearing range? Art, as others have noted, is more than solace; it is a vital point of departure and return for the reconstruction of narrative coherence. Davinder’s commentary on the Okinawan short story, “The Tree of Butterflies” is exemplary: the space of the cave, a space of terror where names disappear in the darkness, is paradoxically also a place of potential rebirth, where in the caressing touch between women new bonds of connectedness just might, against all odds, come into being.

That image of the lost name, the name never asked for in the darkness, puts me in mind of Shoshanna Feldman’s re-reading in The Judicial Unconscious of the famous incident discussed in Hannah Arendt’s Eichman in Jerusalem, in which a witness, a former inmate at Auschwitz, is asked his name by the Prosecutor. Here in Planet Auschwitz we have no names, the names are somewhere else, on the planet of the living. He begins, in panic to hear the voices of the unnamed Dead. He tries to escape from the voices summoned up by the trial by leaving the witness box and is ordered back in by a magistrate. In terror, he collapses.

For Arendt, such moments demonstrate the futility of public tribunals predicated on survivor testimony, on what she views as unseemly spectacle, in contrast to the gravitas of Nuremberg in which evidence of was grounded in the written documents of the perpetrators. For Feldman, in contrast, the witness’ collapse, the embodied performance of ellipsis, is the most eloquent responses to the unspeakable terror and violation of the Shoah.

Theater, dance, fiction, poetry, visual art are all highly mediated engagements with those kinds of eloquent performances (even involuntary ones) but the wounded, by the primary witnesses of terror. As illustrated by the readings Jay organized earlier in the evening, they often seem most effective when they are guided by an ethics of deferral that doesn’t claim direct mimesis but rather calls attention to its own devisedness, its necessary artifice and limitation, forging a space of distance in which, paradoxically, we the living may sense remarkable intimacy with the voices and traces of violated dead.

Those voices in the cave, in the dark, are not the monopoly of any given nation or people. During the war, the national radio broadcasts of the Yasukuni Shrine enshrinement rites were unexpectedly punctuated by the cries of mothers and sisters, who found not solace in the Shinto state’s claim that the military war dead were being apotheosized as national divinities. We need to hear those cries of those bereaved women of Japan as well as the cries of those coerced in sexual slavery as “Comfort Women.” Not because they are all the same, or can can all be considered without regards to measures of complicity. But because they all demand our sustained attention if we have any hope of escaping the cycles of revenge and mutual recrimination, that still seem to plague the Asia-Pacific seven decades after the war’s end. We still need to learn to hear the voices of the Dead and those who mourn, and rediscover amidst those echoes the possibilities of our common humanity.

We then turned to discussion with the audience. John Treat (Yale, emeritus) noted the Second World War is, in a sense, still not over in East Asia: Russia and Japan have not signed a peace treaty, the Korean peninsula remains divided. Do the Comfort Women stands in for the absence of resolution to the war?

We found this question fascinating. Davinder brought up Yoshikuni Igarashi’s Bodies of Memory as she pondered why the image of the body of Comfort Women seems so endlessly productive across all the regions caught up in the Asia Pacific conflict. For Chong Eun, an important legacy of the war are long terms patterns of poverty and economic inequality. Surviving CW were problematic in part because they were low income, belying mythologies of postwar economic miracles in Korea and elsewhere.

Others discussed the challenges of vocabulary. Former CW in the early days struggled over how to characterize themselves, given that no other term than prostitute existed in their mother tongues when they returned home.

A older gentleman who had come out from Seattle shared stories from his own youth in occupied North Korea, of young women fearful of going out on the street, of being taken away from colleges in forced CW recruitment. We were moved that as he spoke he noted that the suffering of Korean women, as terrible as it was, was not unique; that we had to remain mindful of all women raped in war, including German women at the war’s end, as the Red Army advanced.

In similar vein, others noted that the CW case should never be used to excuse other perpetrators of injustice, including the United States. We need to concentrate at certain moments on specific cases, to be sure, but we should do this, ultimately in the interest of refining of comparative understandings of global gender injustice and militarism throughout the globe. Dean Robertson picked up on this theme in her call for a year of dialogue on campus, emerging for this panel, on enduring cycles of gendered violence, sexual slavery and trafficking. My colleague in American Indian Studies, Marna Carroll, picked up questions about the pedagogic challenges of historical self-critique: we critically examine histories of Native American genocide, she often reminds her students, not because we hate America because we love America, because we wish to help live up its inspiring founding promises. Similarly, to critically examine Japan’s histories of wartime atrocity is not to engage in “Japan bashing” but to be attentive to dialectics of oppression and liberation that exist in a vast number of historical contexts.

One student asked about the challenges faced in educating and empowering youth to engage with these historical narratives, whether about the Holocaust or slavery or Comfort Women, when there has been a profound rupture in generational transmission. The question struck us as especially salient in the wake of Baltimore’s response to Freddie Gray’s death, as young protestors decry not only decades of police brutality but also the failures of older generations’ leadership. What new kinds of media, from Slam Poetry to Spoken Word to Hip Hop, are needed as global youth take up the challenge of recovering histories of suffering and recasting them in ways to extended the bonds of human community?

I don’t feel I’ve done justice to the subtlety of the various commentaries and questions, but I hope plan to put up some video from the panel on line. In the meantime, the following post, in Korean, shares some photographs from the revisionist forum, from our reading of testimonies, and from the academic panel:

Afterwards, a number of students told me how much they enjoyed watching their professors argue among themselves on the panel (without being disagreeable) and that they appreciated that while there were profound critiques of the narratives being promulgated next door in the revisionist forum, there was never a trace of personal hostility or ad hominen attack expressed by the panelists. We had been hoping to model for our students rigorous and mature scholarly discourse, not holding back from expressing our significant disagreements with one another. At the same time, we tried to make clear our shared, fundamental commitment to the principle that there is, at the end of the day, such a thing as “evidence” — that can be rationally and responsibly assessed in our never-ending search for deeper understandings of history and of the potential pathways forward.

So many people, near and far, provided invaluable resources and sounding boards as Chong-Eun and I organized the panel, re-immersed ourselves in the salient literature, and pondered how to hit the right tone—resisting pressures towards silence or simplistic reductionism while also avoiding pettiness or personal rancor. Among these were Norma Field, Tomomi Yamaguchi, Ellen Schattschneider, Tani Barlow, Angela Zito, Andy Gordon, Chris Nelson, Jordan Sand, and Emi Koyama. We can’t adequately express our gratitude towards these colleagues and many others, including those who drove out from the University of Washington in Seattle to stand with us in collegial solidarity during this most unexpected evening. Thank you all.

About Me

I'm a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests in Africa and the African diaspora; museums and memory work; ritual and globalization; community conservation and social adaptation to environmental transformation; public art and popular aesthetics in comparative perspective. I serv as director of the Michigan State University Museum in East Lansing, Michigan. I'm the author of the book, "The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family" (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2011)